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1/12/2011 @ 2:29PM2,116 views

Time To Lose Civil War Nostalgia? Some Heresies For The Sesquicentennial

I remember the Civil War—Centennial, that is. I was a kid when all the commemorations began and of course thought it was all pretty cool with the blue and gray forage caps made of cardboard and fake felt, and all the other memorabilia you could acquire; I seem to recall plastic bags of minie balls. We lived in the North and my team was blue, of course: Go Yankees. We held our own reenactments in the back yard.

Having now passed the half-century mark myself, a hundred years doesn’t seem like such a big deal. Yet it’s startling to now realize that there were doubtless many alive back in 1961, in their nineties or even their hundreds, who actually did remember the Civil War, including many who had experienced slavery as small children, being among the last born into it.

Now the Civil War Sesquicentennial is upon us, officially beginning this April on the anniversary of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and it’s much harder to pronounce. And much harder to parse in terms of the legacy and meaning of what it commemorates.

For instance, when the Wall Street Journal trumpeted the increase of population in the South shown in the latest census and the supposed rise in congressional power of conservatives, I stopped and thought: The population increase must include many African-Americans who presumably wouldn’t be sending Republicans to power. But isn’t it sad we still must think in these terms? Are we still living out the aftereffects of the Civil War?

We are. It’s reflected in the continuing red state-blue state false dichotomy, which loosely follows the outlines of the Civil War matchup, somewhat expanded: Maybe we should just revert to calling it gray states versus blue states and then consign it to history. Virginia, North Carolina and many other so-called red states voted for Obama in 2008. Shouldn’t that have been the final nail in the coffin for this facile intellectual gerrymandering?

In upcoming months, old Civil War schisms in the country will be reheated, rubbed raw and overinflated. Some predictions:

There will be controversies about the display of the Confederate flag.

There will be arguments over whether the Civil War was more about states’ rights versus centralized government, and industrialization versus agrarianism, than it was about abolishing slavery.

There will be howls of outrage among many when it’s suggested that Robert E. Lee was in fact a traitor to his country—and shouldn’t be so widely honored. (I also predict “howls of outrage” will continue to be used as a clutch/crutch phrase by pundits to caricature the behavior of whatever “other side” is being designated/denigrated.)

As for what I wish would happen over the next few years:

I’d like to see it pointed out that, far from being bucolic family estates aided by a “peculiar institution” in which the help didn’t have to be paid, plantations were the 19th-century equivalent of slave labor camps. The workers in these places could be and were routinely brutalized and if they were at all defiant even murdered. This lessens the idea there should be so much good will extended to those who fought to the death to defend this system. In the next few years everybody should read or reread Frederick Douglass’ and other slave memoirs if they have any doubts about the horrors of slavery.

I’d like it to be more universally acknowledged during the Sesquicentennial that the slaves in the South and free blacks elsewhere helped build this country. With hard work, brains, determination and all those other good virtues. I think there’s a tendency to think African-Americans, especially in the antebellum era, were a problem to be solved as opposed to vital participants in the American experiment from the very beginning.

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